Patri Friedman’s April 12 TEDxSF talk, “Our Ocean and the Evolution of Societies,” is now up on YouTube. In the talk, his third at a TEDx event, Patri offered an interesting new perspective on the evolution of governance, relating it to evolution of life on earth, and noting the centrality of the ocean to both processes. His message of how seasteading can jump-start societal evolution will hopefully be spread to the far corners of the Internet, where the vivid biological and oceanic metaphors are bound to provoke thought and inspire new support.

“It’s no accident that life first began in the ocean, a place where physical material is shaken and stirred much more rapidly than on land,” Patri noted, adding that all subsequent stages of biological evolution were influenced by the prevailing ecosystem. Governments, Patri went on, are also influenced by an ecosystem of sorts, and the current environment is ill-adapted to further evolution. If we succeed in opening a new ecosystem (the ocean frontier) with dynamic governments and modular building materials, clunky representative democracies may have to quickly evolve into entities that are more responsive to citizens’ needs, or else die off, much like dinosaurs were succeeded by species that were better adapted to the earth’s changing ecosystem millions of years ago.

Patri closed with the following insight: “The utopian dream of creating a single perfect society is impossible. Instead, let’s learn that societies evolve–that a perfect societal ecosystem would be a diversity of ever-adapting individuals, each living in a different way. And so our deepest need is for an environment that offers the open space to nurture the next generation of societies.”

We encourage you to repost the video of Patri’s speech to your social media feeds to ensure that The Seasteading Institute can enable such an environment as quickly as possible!